Theoretical cosmology was the reason I was hired. The one way you could imagine doing it, before the microwave background came along, was you could measure the amount by which the expansion of the universe changes over time. The reason is -- I love Caltech. . What am I going to do? So, becoming a string theorist was absolutely a live possibility in my mind. Not just that there are different approaches. So, that was one big thing. Not to put you on the psychologists couch, but there were no experiences early in life that sparked an interest in you to take this stand as a scientist in your debates on religion. I've brought in money with a good amount of success, but not lighting the sky on fire, or anything like that. In 2017, Carroll presented an argument for rejecting certain cosmological models, including those with Boltzmann brains, on the basis that they are cognitively unstable: they cannot simultaneously be true and justifiably believed. Now, I did, when the quarantine-pandemic lockdown started, I did think to myself that there are a bunch of people trying to be good citizens, thinking to themselves, what can I do for the world to make it a better place? When I was at Harvard, Ted Pyne, who I already mentioned as a fellow graduate student, and still a good friend of mine, he and I sort of stuck together as the two theoretical physicists in the astronomy department. Late in 2011, CERN had a press conference saying, "We think we've gotten hints that we might discover the Higgs boson." This is a non-tenured position. Or, I could say, "Screw it." They met with me, and it was a complete disaster, because they thought that what I was trying to do was to complain about not getting tenure and change their minds about it. Be prolific and reliable. Well, by that point, I was much more self-conscious of what my choices meant. He was an editor at the Free Press, and he introduced himself, and we chatted, and he said, "Do you want to write a book?" Then, I went to college at Villanova University, in a different suburb of Philadelphia, which is a Catholic school. Frank Merritt, who was the department chair at the time, he crossed his arms and said, "No, I think Sean's right. Eventually I figured it out, and honestly, I didn't even really appreciate that going to Villanova would be any different than going to Harvard. It was very long. I won't say a know-it-all attitude, because I don't necessarily think I knew it all, but I did think that I knew what was best for myself. Even though we overlapped at MIT, we didn't really work together that much. That's not what I do for a living. It's not just you can do them, so you get the publication, and that individual idea is interesting, but it has to build to something greater than the individual paper itself. Was that the case at Chicago, or was that not the case at Chicago? And Chicago was somewhere in between. There's extra-mental stuff, pan-psychism, etc. It's my personal choice. And that really -- the difference that when you're surprised like that, it causes a rethink. So, what they found, first Adam and Brian announced in February 1998, and then Saul's group a few months later, that the universe is accelerating. A coalition of graduate students and scholars sent a letter to the university condemning the decision at the time. It is interesting stuff, but it's not the most interesting stuff. So, I went to a large public school. I took almost all the physics classes. I said, well, what about R plus one over R? So, my other graduate school colleagues, Brian had gone to the University of Arizona, Ian Dell'Antonio, who was another friend of mine, went to, I think, Haverford. Recent tenure denial cases raise questions - Inside Higher Ed Do you see the enterprise of writing popular books as essentially in the same category but a different medium as the other ways that you interact with the broader public, giving lectures, doing podcasts? Everyone loved it, I won a teaching award. +1 516.576.2200, Contact | Staff Directory | Privacy Policy. The Russell Wilson drama continues, now almost one full year removed from the trade that sent him from the Seahawks to the Broncos. Huge excitement because of this paper. That group at MIT was one, and then Joe Silk had a similar group at Berkeley at the same time. In 2012, he gathered a number of well-known academics from a variety of backgrounds for a three-day seminar titled "Moving Naturalism Forward". So, that combination of freedom to do what I want and being surrounded by the best people convinced me that a research professorship at Caltech was better than a tenure professorship somewhere else. I'd like to start first with your parents. It's a junior faculty job. I'm a big believer that there's no right way to be a physicist. So, that's one of the things you walk into as a person who tries to be interdisciplinary. He is known for atheism, critique of theism and defense of naturalism. In other words, the dynamics of physics were irreversible at the fundamental level. Others, I've had students who just loved teaching. Well, I was in the physics department, so my desk was -- again, to their credit, they let me choose where I wanted to have my desk. I will." By the way, all these are hard. It won the Royal Society Prize for Best Science Book of the Year, which is a very prestigious thing. When you get hired, everyone can afford to be optimistic; you are an experiment and you might just hit paydirt. You're not going to get tenure. The answers are: you can make the universe accelerate with such a theory. Now, the KITP. It's literally that curvature scalar R, that is the thing you put into what we call the Lagrangian to get the equations of motion. It's rolling admissions in terms of faculty. Roughly speaking, I come from a long line of steel workers. Someone at the status of a professor, but someone who's not on the teaching faculty. I just did the next step that I was supposed to do. What the world really needs is a book that says God does not exist. So, Mark Trodden and I teamed up with a graduate student, my first graduate student at Chicago. George Gamow, in theoretical physics, is a great example of someone who was very interdisciplinary and did work in biology as well as theoretical physics. My mom worked as a secretary for U.S. Steel. Was that something that you or a guidance counselor or your mom thought was worth even considering at that time? I started a new course in cosmology, which believe it or not, had never been taught before. Washington was just a delight. Like, ugh. If you're negatively curved, you become more and more negatively curved, and the universe empties out. It worked for them, and they like it. It was just a dump, and there was a lot of dumpiness. So, I thought that graduate students just trying to learn general relativity -- didn't have a good book to go through. As the advisor, you can't force them into the mold you want them to be in. So, I said, well, maybe there's one theory that does both, that gets rid of dark matter and dark energy by modifying gravity, and the criterion would be gravity gets modified when a certain numerical parameter is less than the Hubble constant. I still do it sometimes, but mostly it's been professionalized and turned into journalism, or it's just become Twitter or Facebook. They're not in the job of making me feel good. If I were really dealing with the nitty gritty of baryon acoustic oscillations or learning about the black hole mass spectrum from LIGO, then I would care a lot more about the individual technological implications, but my interests don't yet quite bump up against any new discoveries right now. They basically admitted that. I have a short attention span. You can't get a non-tenured job. Not even jump back into it but keep it up. And I wasn't working on either one of those. Steven Morrow, my editor who published From Eternity to Here, called me up and said, "The world needs a book on the Higgs boson. Yes, but it's not a very big one. Most of the reports, including the Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Education, mentioned that Sean Carroll, an assistant professor of physics who blogs on Cosmic Variance, also was denied tenure this year. We wrote a lot of papers together. Well, right, and not just Caltech, but Los Angeles. That's less true if what you're doing is trying to derive a new model for dark matter or for inflation, but when what you're trying to do is more foundational work, trying to understand the emergence of spacetime, or the dynamics of complex systems, or things like that, then there are absolutely ways in which this broader focus has helped me. In fact, Jeffrey West, who is a former particle physicist who's now at the Santa Fe Institute, has studied this phenomenon quantitatively. Here is the promised follow-up to put my tenure denial ordeal, now more than seven years ago, in some deeper context. It had gotten a little stuck. It doesn't lead to new technology. Since I wrote So, just show that any of our theories are wrong. There's very promising interesting work being done by string theorists and other people doing AdS/CFT and wormholes, and tensor networks, and things like that. We don't know the theory of everything. He's supposed to answer the questions." So, that would happen. Except, because my name begins with a C, if they had done that for the paper, I was a coauthor on, I would have been the second author. Sean Carroll's Dishonesty: The Debate of 2014 I'm surprised you've gotten this far into the conversation without me mentioning, I have no degrees in physics. I put an "s" on both of them. For hiring a postdoc, it does make perfect sense to me -- they're going to be there for a few years, they're going to be doing research. It's a lot of work if you do it right. So, I could completely convince myself that, in fact -- and this is actually more true now than it maybe was twenty years ago for my own research -- that I benefit intellectually in my research from talking to a lot of different people and doing a lot of different kinds of things. What we said is, "Oh, yeah, it's catastrophically wrong. As a result, it did pretty well sales-wise, and it won a big award. I think there are plenty of physicists. There are so many people at Chicago. That's okay. Refereed versus non-refereed, etc., but I wish I lived in a world where the boundaries were not as clear, and you could just do interesting work, and the work would count whatever format it happened in. So, I said that, and she goes, "Well, propose that as a book. What is it like to be denied tenure as a professor? - Quora Now, you might ask, who cares? So, sometimes, you should do what you're passionate about, and it will pay off. So many ideas I want to get on paper. As much as, if you sat around at lunch with a bunch of random people at Caltech physics department, chances are none of them are deeply religions. Knowing what I know now, I would have thought about philosophy, or even theoretical computer science or something like that, but at the time, law seemed like this wonderful combination of logic and human interest, which I thought was fascinating. Netta Engelhardt and I did a podcast on black hole information, and in the first half, I think we were very accessible, and then we just let our hair down in the second half. I'll say it if you don't want to, but it's regarded as a very difficult textbook. So, they actually asked me as a postdoc to teach the GR course. If the most obvious fact about the candidate you're bringing forward is they just got denied tenure, and the dean doesn't know who this person is, or the provost, or whatever, they're like, why don't you hire someone who was not denied tenure. That's a recognized thing that's going on.
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